The Greeks in Bactria and India c10.s5.233

c10.s5.233

¹ Pan-ku (Wylie p. 44, de Groot p. 109) gives first his own formula for Saca nomads (families *x*, population 5*x*, warriors *x*) and then the same account of a settled agricultural people as Ssu-ma Ch'ien; seemingly he is making more precise what the earlier writer left somewhat vague. ² Hirth p. 112. ³ Hirth p. 95 §19 (Chang-k'ien's Report). ⁴ On the Parthian and Ferghana horses and the ‘heavenly horse’ see Tarn, *Military Developments* 1930 pp. 77 sqq. For the Doura graffiti of Parthian chargers see *Fourth preliminary report of the excavations at Dura-Europos* 1933 Pls. XXI, XXII, and *CAH* vol. of Plates IV p. 26 c (1934). ⁵ Hirth p. 140 suggested that the word, han-hui, might be a transcript of some foreign sound. ⁶ There are two Chinese accounts of what follows. Pan-ku in Chap. XCVI (Wylie pp. 44-5) makes Chang-k'ien himself tell Wu-ti of the Ferghana horses, *i.e.* in 126, and Wu-ti thereon sends an envoy to Ta-yuan who is put to death and the military expeditions of 106-101 follow at once; this cannot be right, for if Wu-ti was sufficiently interested to burst into poetry, twenty years delay is incredible. Ssu-ma Ch'ien (Hirth pp. 109-13) and Pan-ku in the Life (Wylie pp. 70-2) put the whole thing after Chang-k'ien's second mission in 115, and I have followed this in my text; it implies that Wu-ti never knew what the Ferghana horses were really like till *after* he had got the Wu-sun ones which Chang-k'ien brought home in 115, and that therefore Chang-k'ien, though he *heard* of the Ferghana horses in 128, never *saw* them and thought they were like the Wu-sun horses. The latest modern account is that of W. P. Yetts in *Eurasia Septentrionalis Antiqua* IX, 1934, p. 231; but he has not considered the difficulty discussed in this note (does it therefore only exist in the translations?) and does not refer to the great Parthian war-horses.